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October 11, 2011

A map, which is a minute representation of vast territories, is a truncated picture of reality. It is a lie by omission. Representation by symbols always means sacrificing information. Not everything that happens over an area of hundreds of thousands of square miles can be contained on a sheet of paper. The cartographer selects the items he wishes to represent on theoretical grounds. His job is to synthesise, simplify and omit, and his final product is a filtered document. Aspects that may be important - but are more usually considered secondary or superfluous - are removed. The map is simplified to make it legible. In so doing, the author imbues it with his own vision of the world and his own priorities.

Maps are subject to all kinds of manipulation, from the crudest to the most subtle. They are eminently political objects, and governments rightly consider them an effective propaganda tool. A few examples from the Arab world will serve to illustrate this. The day after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi troops, Saddam Hussein appeared on television with a new official map on which Kuwait was shown as a province of Iraq. He claimed that geography proved he was right: Kuwait, situated at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, was a “natural part” of Iraq. For many years the Moroccan government censured all publications containing maps that distinguished between Morocco and former Spanish Sahara. Even a dotted line between the two territories was enough for the publication to be banned. In Arab countries, the mere mention of the name “Israel” on a map was sufficient cause. Either the word was replaced by Palestine, and Israel disappeared from the index, or a graphic item was conveniently placed over the offending country. The matter was so sensitive that the commercial departments of French school publishing houses intervened directly with the editors of text-book series to impose an acceptable representation of Morocco and the Middle East and thus avoid the loss of valuable markets in the French-speaking countries of North Africa.

The depiction of political frontiers is a risky business. It would be wrong to think there are “official” versions of the world’s political divisions. Even the cartography departments of certain United Nations agencies are careful to state on their maps that they bear no responsibility for the depiction of borders, which are indicative only. To avoid offence, the World Bank recently “advised” its cartographic department not to produce maps of the Indian sub-continent on which the Kashmir region figured too prominently. The varying national and international views of territory give the map-maker only too great a choice. China seen by the Chinese does not coincide with China seen by the Indians.

But cartography is more than the tracing of borders. It is also a picture of the relations between people and territory. Maps enable us to comprehend at a glance how territory is organised and occupied, and the extent and consequences of conflicts. Not until a map was made of the Great Lakes region at the end of 1994 after the Rwandan genocide did we realise that terrified populations had fled hundreds of miles through the bush before being settled in refugee camps. The historical dimension also adds to our understanding. African issues cannot be grasped properly without maps of the colonial period. Similarly, the present division and spread of the major ethno-linguistic families can only be understood with the help of maps of the great empires of the past.

This dual approach, geographical and historical, sharpens our understanding of the major issues of the present day. It can help us to be a little less mistaken when we come to assess their significance. Maps let us view territorial, economic and political developments from the necessary distance. They set the stage and position the actors, helping us to ask the right questions rather than giving us the answers. They require us not to jump to conclusions, since the connections between the phenomena shown on a map are rarely straightforward. A published map is a complex, subjective message offered by an author to his readers. It has to be read in a clear-headed and critical manner.

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